Release notes 11-jan-2018-to-02-aug-2020

Technical and functional changes included in the Empxtrack build 7.63.24 – 7.66.1 release.

Date: 02 Aug 2020
Functional changes

Added functionality to upload multiple documents for multiple employees through a single CSV file and a zip file containing multiple employee documents. Will allow easy upload of documents for a new employee in one go and also allow upload of old documents such as archived appraisals in the system.
Home page redesign to allow quick links to display on the home page. More user friendly.
Added HRIS record access permissions for groups in addition to existing permissions for roles. So we can restrict HRIS sections for specific groups such as Recruiter or Account help desk (both derived from HR Manager role) while allowing it for the HR Manager role at a global level.
HR Manager groups with read-only permissions for modules will not have edit rights to settings of the modules for which they have ready-only access.
Added Search on both home page and inner pages to allow users to quickly access product features. This will encourage self-learning.
Filters have been removed from the icon bar and show at the top section of each page. This is expected to simplify usability.
Added At risk, development plans, succession plans, mentoring data to employee profile with access and visibility permissions.
In employee 360 feedback, employees could view plans that were not applicable to them. This has been fixed.
Apply for leave functionality will not be available on attendance dashboard if leave module is turned off.
Added capabilities to display all plans on Manage appraisal page. This will allow visibility of different plans at the same time and will help managers and HR view appraisals for different type of employees.
Added appraisal plan type visibility on the appraisal table view
Added status change for appraisals on individual appraisals to allow changes to an individual status.
Added a pop-up mechanism for images on social feeds to allow the images to be seen in a larger view.
For feeds that are created by employees, the system now displays the employee name and photograph.
Added setup guide for Free Payroll
Cascade goal to employees and view team progress now displays in a dialog box.
Added capabilities to allow Free payroll users to rename the leave type – to whatever is applicable to their organization.

Technical changes

Improvements in slow queries by indexing and dynamically breaking down IN clauses into smaller chunks for reduced table locking, smaller result sets and higher throughput for all threads.
Implementation of new design for lists and select boxes across the product.
Fixes to razor pay purchase process for international purchases.
Added a clip option in common notes to display the availability of attachments with notes.
Improvements to user-interface to travel and expense page.
Goal sheet page for manager has been redesigned for easier access. Added settings to hide goalsheet graphs.
Added an attribute (updateLutsDuringUpdateQuery) on base DAO to avoid update to Last updated time stamp when a super admin is updating records.
Fixes to goal parent linkage and setup of appropriate parent goal (company goal, manager goal etc.)
Fixes to calendar invites for external (non employee) participants formatting issues. If a space was present before an email id, it converted it to special characters that were rejected by some mail servers.
Leave credit functionality did not contain quick links. This has been fixed.
Improvements in the layout and display of all inner pages by making them widget like with a depth effect.
Quick menu format is made the same as other pop-up dialog boxes on the icon bar.
Optimizations in reading unread message count and feed count. This will help in reducing database hits for each load of the page.
Improvements and fixes to On-page help, labels, breadcrumbs, short-cut menus (overlays).
Converted graphs and charts to google-material format.
Fixed user interface of TDS Advice
Fixes to the queries for the empxtrack usage section. Corrected queries for logins, payroll processing, exits, new joinings.
Searching delay added to avoid multiple hits to server for each character type. The client will pause for a specific number of milliseconds after the input of the last character before initiating the search.
Added wfExtensionCode update mechanism (from front-end) for the super admin login. The wfExtensions overrides will display in textfiledata as a separate section.

Technical and functional changes included in the Empxtrack build 7.63.1 – 7.63.23 release.

Date: 04 July 2020
Functional changes

Goalsheet, view achievement report now displays the name of the person who captured the comments.
Employee menu, available to managers and other roles now contains icons. Improvement in UI and rendering based on click instead of hover and dynamic generation to improve page load performance.
Added training nomination facility for an employee with options to view all self nominations for a given period.
Attendance dashboard now contains a month picker allowing a user to specify a month for which attendance is to be displayed. Improves navigation.
Improvements in the training allocation user interface, navigation and functionality.
Improvements in the calendaring functionality.
Improvements in the resignation capture workflow. Employees can add a document with a resignation as well. Required in cases when employees need to submit a form with their resignation.
Fixes to view employee profile and additional options added for different roles to allow granular configurations.
While viewing training gap in JD gap analysis, we can now nominate an employee from the gap document itself.
While applying for leave from the attendance dashboard, the leave date automatically gets initialized to the current date of the attendance.
Added a report for identifying at risk employees. Allow HR Managers to add notes for an At risk submission for future reference.
Added reports to display employee mentors, development plans created
Visibility of past in-active manager-employee relationships on the relationship widget with dates of changes.
HR Managers can invoke Job description edits from the Excel page while doing a JD view / gap analysis.
Improvements in Form 24Q generation page. Developed a new form24Q for the latest FVU validations for submitting quarterly returns. Bug fixed to get company wise salary records(SD) in Form 24Q quarter 4 report.
Added configuration section for social feed generation and display. This will allow auto-generated social feeds to be controlled based on the type of events allowed.
Added capabilities in goal sheet to restrict the number of goals to a min and max number.
Added capabilities in performance appraisal goal sheet form to restrict the number of goals to a min and max number.
Added options to create company and department level goals that are not linked to a specific time period. These will be imported into employee goalsheets irrespective of the period for which the goal sheet is being created. This will allow setting of multi-year goals.
Linkage of training programs to Job Descriptions, completion of functionality in this release. Trainings can be made periodic and gap analysis would display all pending trainings.
Improvements in Exit management configuration. Entire exit and F&F process can be now configured from the front-end and options added for updating code for F&F.
In the add / edit employee mode, the date of birth and date of joining and other dates will now contain the date format next to the label based on the tenant date format.
Improvements in setup salary structure in PI product.
Added capability to allow employees to re-order widgets on the Engage, Measure, Process and Excel pages. Employees could select the widgets order and visibility for the different roles available to them and get a completely customized feel.
Added an announcement functionality in empxtrack. Announcements could be product announcements or customer based announcements and will be available just once to each employee. Multiple announcements can be setup with expiry dates, group access etc.
Payroll heads can be linked with various statutory deductions (PF, ESI, TDS, Gratuity etc.) and defaults overridden on a per client basis.
Added functionality in attendance to limit the number of overtime hours to a specific number. Also added options to hide overtime completely for a specific type of worker (say salaried employees).

Technical changes

Added search and filter capabilities for competencies and skills, roles and responsibilities data layouts during master edits and in job descriptions.
Moved training configurations to the top level and accessible to HR Manager on the Excel page.
Added leave credit functionality to the leave widget for HR Managers.
Goalsheet view for HR Manager / CEO roles now opens in a new window. Allows multiple goalsheets to be viewed.
Added search functionality for email templates, schedulers and marketing automation contact activities.
Improvements in user interface for corrective action.
Improvements in UX for HR Help Desk with addition of navigation buttons and correction in breadcrumbs.
Added capabilities to download merged word documents in PDF format.
Security improvements in on-boarding with candidate signatures to be enforced by candidates only.
Corrections to exit survey form setup navigation.
Added capabilities to display clip icon in front of notes and common notes if a document is attached to the note.
Exit and transfer setup have been moved to Manager services from Master settings.
Improvements in 360 form layout in performance appraisals.
Bug fixes in the advanced search field.
Fixes to calendar event setup for multi-day events when weekends are to be eliminated. Improvements in time-picker for calendar and many miscellaneous improvements in display of active events on the icon bar. Deleted events now no longer show in the employee time availability view.
Bug fixes to letter setup functionality.
Movement of all legends to the top for all charts, dashboards and graphs.
Improvements in marketing automation user interface, contact fields edit has cleaner interface.
Support desk now allows specific individuals to run update and insert queries from the support desk query section. This is optionally enabled for project managers.
Enabled restrictions on the type of files being uploaded for each upload section.
Enabled option to revert a label to original value for a tenant.
Comment helper was not able to update the rating in competency form if the rating type was a slider. This has been resolved.
Improvements in user interface of all tables. Redundant lines do not display any more.
Improvements in the user interface of workflows. The workflow progression is now responsive and works seamlessly in mobiles too – independent of the number of steps in the workflow.
Many improvements in labels and help content for different widgets and associated functionality. Linkage to appropriate help pages.
Improvements in performance of many queries – especially related to large data downloads in areas of attendance, appraisals, leave and workflows.
Fixes to caching to handle scenarios where null objects are stored on cache.
Improvements in the Free payroll purchase process, addition of different modules for purchasing, cancellation of purchased modules, increase / change of employee licenses and options to purchase setup support.
Optimizations of manage declaration page.
All select boxes including multi-select have a typing option where a user can type choices and items will be automatically filtered based on the inputs.
Improvements in navigation and auto redirection of URLs to the appropriate servers.
Naming conventions for servers have been cleaned up and made consistent. All customers will have a clean url of the form .empxtrack.com. Paid customers can also request a specific URL that will display for them as required. Tight linkage of URLs with cloudflare.
Automatic correction of dates in case appropriate separator character is not entered. The system will accept dd-MM-YYYY, dd/MM/yyyy, dd.MM.YYYY and other separators automatically. This will help in data loads where excel often changes the formats based on local preferences.
Added debug options in API invocation. All API calls will be logged in APILogger.log
Many properties (not available in configurations) added to property management to allow easier changes for individual customer needs.
Improvements in message count display and memory utilization. Used caching with session based storage for reduced database hits and lower memory utilization.
Added capability to download monthly sheet variable mapping and payroll variable mapping (default variable mapping) from the administrator settings section. This will allow development teams to use the existing structure being used during updates
Addition of new calc engine function, !checkModulePurchased to help avoid custom coding for this functionality at every area. Implemented across the product.
At the application level, all reports to be identified which are pulling data without any filter related to current time-period or financial period and to add the default time period. This is for query optimization.
Social feeds will display first name only. If first name is less than 3 characters, will show the full name.
When employees view their salary structures and dependent salary heads exist, we have added improvements in head visibility at employee head.
Added capability to attach documents with marketing automation contact activity
Added capability (employeeRole.enable.on.login property) to setup a specific role when employees login. Currently role selection happens on the basis of role availability: manager, hr or employee in this sequence, but a specific role can be overridden as well. Added the property to Miscellaneous properties as well.
Improvement in breadcrumb display in case the size increases beyond a certain number of characters.
Changes to login functionality to display an error in case the login fails.

Technical and functional changes included in the Empxtrack build 7.62.1 – 7.63.0 release.

Date: 16 April 2020
Functional changes

Launch of Empxtrack Free payroll product.
Improvements in user interface and display of Ids and document section of employee profile.
Added support for emoticons in social feed.
Mentoring functionality added. Employees can request a mentor and once approved, the employee and mentor can work together on various development initiatives. All mentoring related details are available in employee career profile and HR and other senior employees (in spans above) can view development notes for employees and write their comments. This is an add-on feature.
Display of succession information and associated development and career plans on employee career profile.
API level integration with docusign. Customers with DocuSign accounts can use empxtrack to generate offer letters, issue policy document updates.
Integration of docusign documents with empxtrack letter creation facility.
Added gross payment and net payment columns in process payroll for easier access to employee data.
Training programs can be linked to Job descriptions. This will allow identification of gaps and automatic training requirement generation for employees with specific JDs.
Added “At risk identification” functionality to the product. Managers can mark employees as ‘At risk’ with a mitigation and retention plan. The workflow will go HR where appropriate actions can be taken to prevent the employee from leaving the company. This is an add-on feature.
Added functionality in Attendance to allow us to view days when employees applied for WFH. Also added icons when employees have applied for Compensatory off acquire and Compensatory off utilization. This reduces the attendance related queries that were coming in – especially because of Covid-19 scenarios.
Removal of Silver, Gold and Enterprise purchase options from Free payroll application based on customer feedback. Now customers would be able to buy the Bronze application and selectively purchase modules on their requirements.
Added features to assign goals to Units, Organization and Projects. These goals can be cascaded to the same unit, sub-units and other units and then to employees. Automatic creation of goal sheets and goal assignments based on the rules.
Added a comment / notes section for units to allow different stakeholders to share information on various aspects of the Unit.
Added New taxation regime (India FY 2020-21)to Version 8 of the payroll with TDS advice under the old regime and new regime and HRs capabilities to support employee preferences for either of the 2 regimes.
Added many improvements in creation of organization structure, assignment of employees, searching and easier access and visibility.
Improvement in the tracking sheet user interface, access and display. Managers can create tracking sheets, assign goals to employees with a periodicity and these will all display in the goalsheet page. Tracking will allow managers to break year long goalsheets into smaller chunks of SMART goals that are applicable to employees for a smaller timeframe. The achievement comments will feed into the actual goals and will move to evaluation.
All feeds are editable by HR to allow auto-feeds to be removed or edited.
When a person clicks on a row or a message/notification, the default action will be automatically invoked in the desktop mode. For mobile mode, the actions are displayed on the tap post which the user can select the appropriate action. In desktop mode, the actions will display on the hover functionality of the table row.

Technical changes

Added option to company directory configuration to show/hide display of employee profile and hierarchy on the company directory.
!encode_decode() will also support Base64 encode and decode through another option.
Added new calc engine function !signWithRs256(“text”,”privateKey”) to allow integration with various platforms that support RSA 256 bit encryption.
AbstractObject to JSON conversion will now not quote number types and will keep them as numeric types in the generated JSON.
All confirmation and error messages now display in a pop-up widget on the bottom-left corner of the screen instead of being displayed in an alert box or being written on a specific area of the screen. This improves readibility and visibility of the notifications and messages.
All HRIS string fields now support an optional input format to allow data to be captured in the specific format. For eg. We can specify 999-**** format for a field and this will force three numbers followed by a hyphen and then 4 characters while entering data. Note: Existing data will not be impacted and would only impact new data input from the user interface. (Uploads will not follow this)
Added Go option on the role/feature selection menu. This will allow a user to quickly change their role and remain on the same page and avoid navigation challenges.
Added masters for Succession planning and Mentoring framework and these are under the attribute “Development plan types”
Improvements in Rewards and Discipline capture navigation.
Message center page improvements. The daily calendar now displays in a Calendar icon on the icon bar and also allows addition of a new entry. Larger space for Social feeds
Social feeds and Message center user interface improvements. Removal of scroll bars and continuous scrolling added. Currently displaying 25 messages and 10 feeds and as one nears the end, more will be loaded automatically.
All dialog boxes have rounded corners and better font display.
Improvements in user interface of applicant tracking pages on the candidate and web-site end.
Display of level for each level of cascade in Unit linked goals. For each level of cascading, the level will increase automatically and this will be adjusted for all child goals if the parent relationship changes.
Fixes to parameter driven auto-scheduled reports where parameters were not being initialized correctly and empty reports were being mailed.
Fixes to marketing automation mailer scheduler issues where multiple emails were being sent because of incorrect calculations of next mail sending time. (Integer overflow issues).
Fixes to appraisal display page for managers where graphs were not being displayed if the number of non-initialized evaluations was zero.
Linkage of common notes with individual modules. Earlier we were displaying on the basis of Ids only and a common note of one module could display in another module.
Capabilities to associate tips with employee fields on HRIS. If available, this will show against the field when an edit is done.
Improvements and bug fixes in the calendar including – forcing start time, display improvements,
Onboarding help pages display page help in a clickable help section improving the look and feel of the page considerably and corresponding to the page design of the application.
Improvement in training-self-nomination workflow and user interface. There were challenges in nominations.
HR Manager tasks breadcrumb corrections made. Now a user is taken back to the HR Manager task page on clicking cancel or done. Earlier it was going to the process page.
Added additional properties for dashboard and chart hide/display for goal sheet dashboards available at the manager level. Changes to Performance management properties in Miscellaneous Properties section in Admin >> Settings
Added additional properties for dashboard and chart hide/display for appraisal dashboards available at the hr and manager level. Changes to Performance management properties in Miscellaneous Properties section in Admin >> Settings

Technical and functional changes included in the Empxtrack build 7.52 – 7.62 release.

Date: 01 Feb 2020
Functional changes

Display of all leave types in bradford factor report in Leave.
Added Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet (.xlsx) and Microsoft word document (.docx) merging features. Customers can upload their template documents and empxtrack will be able to merge data with the documents and provide output in the desired formats. This will lead to creation of statutory reports in exact formats, generation of offer letters and other documents in a pre-formatted manner.
Added integration and purchase with RazorPay. Now empxtrack supports Stripe for international payments and Razorpay for India payments.
Automatic generation of holiday calendar and weekends for a new FY or calendar year when it has not been created by HR.
Added link for Mark exit in employee profile in case customer has not purchased Exit module. This option will easily exit an employee without changing status or other complex changes. Only available to HR.
Added days worked functionality in Attendance dashboard. HR can quickly check this prior to payroll processing to quickly understand why leave without pay will be marked for employees. Added options for clear attendance, mark holiday, mark weekend on attendance dashboard.
Added Pending approvals indicator in payroll pre-processing page. This indicates all employees who have pending leave or attendance approvals and payroll processing will not proceed for such employees. Added rules to prevent leave applications, attendance regularizations by employees or HR for the payroll period once payroll processing has started. These rules are applicable to HR also once payroll has been calculated.
Improvements in setup of PF and ESIC setup rules for employees.
Usability and user interface of employee preferences and declarations improved significantly. Now all employee data displays in tables and individual edits can be carried out for declarations or preferences. This allows easy setup, view, comparison.
State wide LWF details added to product. Based on the state of an employee, LWF and PT deductions would be carried out automatically for all employees.
Comments and notes that are created in payroll processing captured while inputting extra payments are displayed on pay-slip.
Added options to merge Employee data and Career Profile. One link will show both options to employee, manager and HR.
Customer on-boarding process improved significantly for Free Payroll.
Improved user interface for Documents, Confidential IDs, Skill sheets, Experience in the employee profile.
Added options to only edit current salary of an employee. Past salaries will exist as viewable only.
Added capabilities for single page view of application. We support 2 different modes for single page view. Performance management and HR/Payroll. This is typically useful when customers have a few modules selected. The page will display all the relevant widgets with drill down capabilities.
Calendar control displays upto 50 years backwards from the existing 10 years.
Added mobile number field to employment info that can be used in company directory.
Simplified view for setting up of attendance, leave rules in the Free Payroll product.

Technical changes

Added a new function !encode_decode to allow UUEncoding of strings.
Fixes to DAOBase to allow cases where “where clause” is not specified. Eg in Count(*), delete
!daoInsert now returns the primary key for storage, DBEncryption now allows the conversion of one key to another key through command line
Improvements in Code processor to better handle and display errors in calc-engine code. Now errors indicate the exact code line in app logger.
Implementation of visibility rules for different components of application.
Improvements in Job Offer user interface and approval process.
Merging of Try and live databases. All trials will now be created on the live database and be under configuration management and support. Launch of Free payroll application on 15 Jan 2020
Added code to support Amazon Aurora where we will support 2 different databases – write mode: will go to the central writable database and read mode: will go to the local read database.
Patch-build + deploy process redeveloped to use ANT instead of windows batch files.
IP Restrictions on Staging and FTP servers have been removed.
Added integration with SendGrid for sending different kinds of transactional and marketing emails from empxtrack and reverse callback integration to handle events.
Added integration with email-validator
Added post activity completion schedulers for constant touch with prospects
Added trial setup mode to local, script, dual to handle different scenarios for setup of new tenants. This will apply to both Trial HR and Free Payroll demos.
Clearing client cache had challenges from support help desk. The functioality is available for user 1 but we were setting masquerade option. This has been resolved.
Table rows click will automatically initiate the first action in the icon list. So if View attendance is the first icon for a table, clicking on the row will automatically invoke this action.
Added options to UPDATE, INSERT, DELETE on the !runQuery call at the super admin level.
Added calc engine call !updateProperties to allow addition / update of properties from calc-engine code. Support for data array, key value pairs and tilda separated list available to this call.

Technical and functional changes included in the Empxtrack build 7.47 – 7.51 release.

Date: 02 Dec 2019
Functional changes

Timesheet entries copy enabled. Users can copy prior timesheets to the current period.
Adding vacant positions to organization chart projects. Implemented cascade functionality to organization chart such that all values will be consolidated for an org unit if this option is selected.
Holidays and leave visible in timesheet summary view. Timesheet dashboards (projects, hours worked, activities) added
Master data changes audit trail option added. Now administrator gets a report of all changes to Masters with date of change, changes by, original and new values.
Added functionality to change leave dates for approved leave. The system will cancel the leave, and reapply for the new dates. This is required in cases when – employee changes functionality, changes in holiday or leave calendar. Note: Workflows will need additional features for this to work successfully.
Introduction of payroll version 8 that significantly improves the user interface and handling of payroll processing.
New features and layout in setup employee salaries. We now display the salaries for employees with options to only display those employees whose salary has not been assigned. Options for mass download and upload of employee salaries by selection of appropriate salary structure.
Added home page selection option in Home portal layout settings. Customers can configure their own home page.
Added Bank masters for various banks. About 20 different bank details added to the product. Added options to store bank account number, address, IFSC code. This will make it easier for customers to map empxtrack to their bank details for easier disbursal of salaries.
Added features to integrate images and HTML. This can be used to generate award letters, recognitions, certificates etc in empxtrack.
Added functionality to add or remove forms in initiated appraisals. This will allow changes to the evaluation even after it has been started. Helps when the wrong forms were initiated for an employee. Note: The new forms have to be the part of the plan from which the appraisal was created.
Updates to payroll module. The salary heads can be dynamically assigned various characteristics such as taxable, part of ESI, part of PF and so on. This will allow easier adaptation to salary rules. Updates to salary calculation engine. All existing customers have been updated with these changes.
Added functionality for import of pre-existing holiday calendars. We are offering a full list of holidays for multiple regions. The user can import these and then remove those holidays that are not applicable to their organization or region. Currently providing data for India and US. More templates will be added moving forward.
Revamp of goalsheet display for HR Manager, HOD and CEO modes for quick access to achievements, cascading and view of team goals.
Added Search employee on icon bar to quickly seach for employees. The employee profile will display as per the role of the user and default display will be in Any profile.
Upload goal sheet functionality implemented. An employee, HR or manager can upload goals using a CSV file.
Compensation dashboards added to the Measure page for quick view on the status of compensation updates.
Options added in payroll configurations to identify the steps in payroll processing. Customers can have a 3 (not processed, processed, disbursed) or 4 (+finalized) or 5 (+submitted for appoval) steps payroll processing based on their specific needs.
Added options for recruiter configuration. We can now identify all employees with HR Manager (Recruitment module) and give them rights of Recruitment manager or Recruiter. Recruitment managers can approve requisitions and assign to recruiters, view reports and dashboards. Recruiters can handle the applicant tracking process.
Significant improvements in features and UI of applicant tracking module. Added options for scheduling multiple interviews for a selected candidate. Interviewer notifications and views improved.
Improvements in user access through a Role menu. Users can change their role and view the associated options available with that role.
Payroll variation report supports a new feature of optionally displaing variations only if they are above a specific amount.

Technical changes

Centralized code for version checking through a !checkVersion call. Will be checking product version, product name, structure, userMode and support EQ, NEQ, IN, NOTIN, GT, GTE, LT, LTE, BETWEEN options. Added !checkModuleConstraint(module name, function) function to check various types of constraint uses to display section, controls etc. in the HRIS. This will check for the users authorizations to view or edit sections of employee profile.
Improvements in MailProcessor to handle attchments in emails.
Fixed issues in Iterator. Increment variable was not set correctly in the last iteration.
Integration of gsuite SSO with empxtrack.
Centralization of bread-crumb code generation.
Implementation of key-value pair for AbstractObjects. Will assist in API integration with external API calls.
Implementation of mail authentication API to authenticate email id of users added to application.
Added options to pass time period to workflow readers. This helps in optimization of calls and reduces the amount of data being read during a display of workflow driven dashboard such as Leave and Attendance. Significant optimizations in reading workflows with removal of single reads during schedulers and reports.
Automated the patch-build process with builds or patches to be applied to multiple servers simultaneously and that includes template updates, jar file updates, stule and js updates.
Optimized reads for travel and expense modules by adding extra parameters on persistence tables for these two modules. For travel added: journeyStartDate, journeyEndDate, requestDate, dateOfJourney, suggestedTravelDate and for Expense startDate, endDate, createdDate, commentDate, approvedDate
Updates to server mapping and improvement in searching for application URLs and redirection.
Improvements in displaying page help. The help content will be retrieved on-demand only improving the load time for the page.
Search functioanlity has been enabled in dialog box instead of a separate tab. This integrates the searching with the DWR mode and improves the UI and functionality.
Added material charts to empxtrack
Added drag-drop capabilities for uploading files.
Added options on table rows to display icons instead of buttons in the last column.
Options added (with configuration) to display activity confirmation in Alert box or on the page itself.
Added SFTP data transfer mechanism to the product. Now we can upload or download files from SFTP sites. Also added drop-box integration for FTP transfer.
Added configurations in company directory to prevent display of heirarchy or employee profile.
Added functionality to download workflow configurations and upload a workflow in the application. This will allow easier development of workflows on dev server and then post approval, upload into the live application for use. The generated file contains calc engine code and appropriate updates made to handle special characters.
Added multi-day events in tasks and events.

Technical and functional changes included in the Empxtrack build 7.46 release.

Date: 03 Sep 2019
Functional changes

Improvements in attendance functionality at Manager and HR roles for easier analysis, corrections and reporting. For the current days attendance, there are 4 tabs available now: Completed, Ongoing, No attendance and Leave/Travel. In prior days attendance, there are 3 tabs available: Complete, Incomplete and Leave/Travel. HR can now view the monthly attendance details for an employee by clicking on the view button. The details for the employee will show up in a new window. Using the Ongoing tab, HR can easily identify the employees in office at any given time.
Attendance changes can also handle special cases where a person is on half-day leave and attends the office for the remainder of the day. The employee would show on the Leave tab and Ongoing tab (once they start their attendance) and on Leave tab and Complete tabs once they complete their attendance.
Survey functionality navigation has been improved for HR. A single entry point has been created where HR can initiate new surveys, view reports or edit survey forms. Reports will allow analysis by attribute
Significant enhancements in usability of the Projects and Timesheet module. Employees have an easier and mobile compatible mechanism to capture time. Project managers can view details of time spent in a variety of ways and dashboards and also view all time entries of employees for the entire year. Managers can view time details for team with visibility into time entries and consolidation across different parameters: project, activities and employees. Added support for download of data in CSV. The new user interface will improve decision making and allow insights into time utilization of employees.
Salary scatter chart displays all employees in a specific cluster (salary+experience). Users can click on any area in the chart and this will display all employees in the salary and experience range for further analysis. The chart automatically displays data with clear differentiation across genders.
Added organization structure capabilities to the product that allows an organization level view by units. Users can view employees, leave, travel and expense data, cost information, attendance, timesheet data (for project based units), performance data and utilization projections. The organization structure supports various kinds of units: Company, SBU, Location, Department, Sub-department, Function and Project. Added capabilities for permission management (both individual unit level and cascading views) and unit head.
Added functionality to add Organization, Group, Project and Manager goals to goalsheet form of appraisals. This capability can be assigned to employees, managers and other roles individually.
Added capabilities to re-process monthly sheet variables during payroll processing. For processes such as attendance capture, data often changes post initial calculations (once data gaps are identified). To prevent a full payroll re-processing (which users had to do prior to this functionality), the system now allows users to re-process specific variables for one or more employees and then complete the payroll finalization.
Added capabilities to setup edit rights for monthly sheet variables. Only those variables will allow edits that support edit rights. This will ensure that user do not change values of variables where the organization wants to enforce automatic processing (such as timesheet hours, days present, loan refunds, expense reimbursement etc.). This will ensure higher compliance in the payroll processing and avoidance of errors.
Added narration (comment) capture capabilities while editing monthly sheet variables. For each edit, the user will have to specify comments as to why they made a change to a processed value. The changes will also show as a report to ensure compliance.
Added capabilities to pro-rate payroll calculations for the first payroll run for a new employee. If an employee is added to the system post the payroll cut-off date, their payroll was not processed for the month they joined in. The system now automatically identifies this discrepancy and adjusts the payout days in the subsequent payroll run.
Added Candidate relationship management functionality with search, filter, individual edits, mass upload, mail sending, web-site integration (Beta release).
Many statutory fields in Form 24Q, Form 16 and other compliance related forms were hard-coded into templates leading to customizations for each implementation. Added functionality to setup all these fields in the payroll setup section for each company for which the forms will be generated.

Technical changes

Added functionality in custom workflows to allow messages to be sent to multiple people holding the same role simultaneously. So if there are 2 HR managers and if this property is checked for the workflow, the message would go to both of them.
Added capabilities to maintain an audit trail for all master changes. The functionality will help identify who changed the master and what values were changed.
Travel and expenses sheets open in new window. This allows for easier view of the sheets.
HR Help desk requests open in a new window. Allows for easier management of functionality without losing data set in filters.
Added filters in help desk for easier identification and management of help desk issues/queries.
In CPM, the employee interactions dashboard will be based on the selected time period.
While setting permissions on menus and widgets, the permissions were not getting allocated to secondary links. As an example, a user could view the Manage payroll tab but could not access the dashboards. Now the widgets and secondary urls have been linked to allow simpler management and updates on menu management will automatically enable the functionality.
Fixed incident master issues.
Fixed the display of photograph issues in the Feed section. Sometimes photographs were not getting loaded.
Added capabilities to generate shortcut menus from properties instead of hard-coding in pages. This will allow easier management of shortcut menus – especially when we want to enable/disable functionality for specific roles or groups.
Added save and add more functionality while capturing timesheets.
Added capabilities in calendar to automatically scroll to the current date in list view. Also set the default view as List view in calendar view.
Leave transaction report bug fixes. The report now includes leave credit details as well.
Added CPM configurations setup to the administrator section.
Improvements in functionality in manage workflow states. Added functionality to change workflow states for Timesheets and display of timesheet time periods for easier selection of the relevant timesheets.
Linkage of product version in the footer section to this release notes.
In payroll, employees who have joined post a payroll period will not show in the unprocessed count.
Added a property to avoid display of resigned status on employee photograph. Some customers do not want to display resigned status on employee photographs.
Automatic creation of a default job position for a Unit when we create a new unit in the organization structure
Capabilities to add multiple organization structures with one of them being the default. Display of organization structure to all employees but visibility and edit rights can be controlled for groups and/or employees. Display of units in different colors based on the access rights.
Complete revamp of the user interface of the organization structure module with easier navigation and display
Improvements and fixes in the display of the employee role option for each page of the application. Removal of the box menu that displayed the menu choices. The menu will automatically pop-up when a user clicks on the role.

Technical and functional changes included in the Empxtrack build 7.45 release.

Date: 26 July 2019
Functional changes

In Org chart / manpower planning, one can now view employees assigned to a Unit and view their career profile and other menus.
In Project based CPM, allowed a team member to view evaluations and goal sheets for all other members when one of the evaluation is opened. Improvements in navigation.
Communicate option added to the Data Gap report.
The appraisal dashboards will now use the employees associated with the group for which the plan has been created. Appraisal status dashboard (especially Non initiated status) will now display accurate counts.
Display of salary structure updates (and associated messages) will not be displayed to an employee if the salary applicable date is in the future. This will apply to career profile, salary structure and other areas where salary breakup is being displayed. The new salary breakup will be visible to HR for letter generation or analysis.
Every page will display the employees current role as a label on the top right-corner. Clicking on the role label will open a menu with all navigation options available to the current employee role. The user can change their role and view other navigation options available to them. Clicking on an option will change their role appropriately.
Added a configurable Pre-payroll run report that contains details on all the parameters that are important prior to payroll processing. The parameters will use data for the existing pay period and includes: New Employees added, Employees exited, Employees who have become senior citizens, attendance data (including mis-punches, no data, conflict data), Personal data updates/gaps, Loan payments and returns, Expense payouts, Investments not available, Changes to investments, Salary changes. Each of these will consider data for the salary period. Added configuration options to allow additional parameters to be added for customers or the existing ones modified.
In payroll declarations, display the number of declarations for prior time period to employees.
Fixed issues related to Full and Final processing: System was calculating negative days, if last date of employee falls in processed payroll month.
Added filters for HR Manager to filter tickets on Status, Priority, Category, Sub-category and Date range. Merged the 3 tabs to a single tab.
Added “At risk identification” form in Performance appraisal.

Technical changes

Fixed errors in attendance upload due to wrong API method call for a number of tenants.
When HR (or any other role) opened the profile of an employee through company directory or employee hierarchy, the role used for the view was the Any role. This led to challenges in edit and view of employee details because of HRIS restrictions. Fixed this to allow the profile to be opened in the currently selected role of the employee.
Fixed issues related with clearing of group assignment to an employee or deletion of a group when employees were assigned to it. The groups were still assigned to the employee till cache was reset.
Fixes to the mail processor to allow mails to be sent to alternate email ids. One specific customer wanted payslips to be sent to personal email for employees. Added options to allow e-mail address to be changed for different modules of empxtrack.
Added a customizable ticket id generator for customers. This allows different ticket types to have different ids, prefixes, and suffixes to allow for easier analysis at customer end.
Ticket id generation was based on a global sequence. Now it will be based on client specific sequences.

Technical and functional changes included in the Empxtrack build 7.43 – 7.44 releases.

Date: 11 July 2019
Functional changes

In payroll, for monthly sheet variables, each variable was associated with a specific gettor leading to challenges in assigning dynamic calculate mechanisms for the variables. Implemented changes to assign any calculate/import mechanism for each variable.
Implementation of Daxtra parser for resume parsing.
Enabled generation of password protected documents (such as pay-slip, form 16 etc.) when they are mailed to employees
Mechanism to search for a specific subordinates goalsheet. Allows easier selection of employees when a large team exists.
Improvements in Applicant Tracking search settings.
Display of monthly calendar of leave to allow managers and HR to view the employees leave records in a calendar control.
Mechanism added to mark resources as returned on the employee career profile. Will assist in Full and Final of an exiting employee.
Added rules to display a new salary structure to an employee only after the effective date. The new salary details will be visible to the HR Manager.
Improvements in UX and navigation to the CPM module.
Added options for Succesion Planning widgets and links to CEO role (besides the HR Manager role)
Payroll calculations – in auto-employee-select batch mode has an option added to allow view and selection of individual employees. Finalize and disburse mode will allow individual employee selection (irrespective of mode selected) to allow edits to payout modes.
In CPM, project team members will not be able to view ratings but will be able to view comments. Added employee drop-down menu. Added improvements to CPM module in the regular application.
Added options to edit the offer details in Applicant Tracking module.
Added options for setup of offer letter document naming convention.
Fixed issues in attendance where attendance dashboard are not updated while creating weekend although the option is available during holiday creation.
Added workflow cancellation option in Travel and expense workflows.
Added options to edit travel or expense dates once the workflow is submitted.
Added rules for compensatory off validations and lapse. The lapse rules kicked in when an employee applied for a comp-off but now only the eligible compensatory off will display based on the rules setup for the customer.
Updated the UX of survey with options for page-breaks, images, headers and sections. Each attribute can have a separate rating – that can be created while setting up the survey attributes.
Significant improvements in the survey display to employees with options for saving the survey partially and coming back later.
Improvements in survey reports with analysis on number of submits, data and comment display.
Redisign of the message page to include social feeds. Removal of separate social feed page. Enablement of social feeds in mobile mode.
Implementation of a separate workflow for the Employee other detail section. Currently some customers do not allow employees to edit the employment detail section and the other detail section was linked to this. The two have been separated.
For different dashboards on the Process page, enabled click-on options for each individual bar. This will display a pop-up dialog of employees with relevant details. Enabled for Leave, Travel, Expense.
Added options to select employee columns in data gap reports. Data gap reports will behave as other employee data reports.
Empxtrack utilization report available at the administrator level now has only one tab with editable date options. Helps in navigation.
Payroll features are available as tabs on the Manage Payroll section. This allows the HR Manager (or Payroll Administrator) to view all payroll related functionality, including reports, data capture, challans, salary structures etc. on one page. Improvements in user interface of individual tabs.
All reports with employee details now contains the employees’ photograph and employee pop-up menu to allow immediate analysis and view of employee records.
Setup of tabs on the recruitment page to allow all recruitment related activities from one page. The individual pages would contain elements such as status. The different tabs added include Applicant Tracking, On-boarding, Candidate relationship management and Candidate management. The tabs will be enabled based on the purchase of appropriate functionality.
The box menu now contains a role selection drop down to allow the user to select a role (available to them) and view the associated menus. This allows for smoother navigation and easier role switches.
Added filter options to various pages including payroll dashboards, attendance.
Added Salary vs Experience Scatter chart for deeper analysis into salaries across the organization.
Dashboard details for Leave, Travel, Expense and Exit allowed display of monthly data on the basis of the click on the chart bar. Added scroll options to move forward and backward restricted to the selected time period.
Form 16 A and B merging issues have been resolved.

Technical changes

Schedulers have been moved from super tenant to individual tenants for all tenants and all schedulers converted to custom schedulers. This includes reminder schedulers for social feeds, pending tasks and others.
Migration of client implementations can now be carried out for specific files instead of all files. Allows easier methodology for phased implememntations.
Fixed issues related to report display in dashboards.
Added functionality at the super-administrator for clearing memory caches across multiple tomcats. This will help avoid restarts of tomcats or individual logins to tomcats when migrations happen.
Added Amazon incremental backup to image server
All tabular displays on process and excel tabs (such as attendance details, training details) have been converted to tabular display.
Fixed multiple issues in career page including display issues, import of CSS and apply button visibilty.
Added setup at administrator level to link post-activity-completion with WF Extension code. If available, this will be automatically invoked and can be customized for customers.
Added code to allow setup of header and footer for PDF document generation. This will be useful while generating offer letters in client specific formats.
Changed display of dialog boxes to not close when a user inadvertently clicks outside the box.
Improvements in display of employee hierarchy.
Fixed issue related to scrolling in dialog boxes. Earlier the last scroll position was maintained when the dialog box was opened the second time. This has been fixed to move the scroll position to the top.
Fixed issues related to data conflicts when HR Manager opened multiple employee tabs and updated data in these.
Applicant tracking issues related to visibility of jobs post closed date have been addressed.
Advanced search selection of Current employee status by default has been implemented. By default All status was selected at the HR Manager level allowing exited employees to be displayed too.
Cancelled leave records were showing in dashboard calendar. This has been addressed.
Fixed issues related to display of sub-category of expense types in Expense and reimbursement module.
Added the display of individual menu items (Engage, Measure, Process and Excel) to the box menu. Removed the flat menu on the home page and related pages.
Fixed issues related to employee selection on report scheduler. Earlier we were storing email ids with the reports which led to issues when the reports were sent to exited employees. Now these are restricted to employee ids through an employee selection mechanism and the scheduled reports are sent out to only active employees.
Tomcat specific properties related to empxtrack application have been moved to a property file and linked to the specific tomcat they were being used in. This will lead to easier management of tomcat specific properties, faster load balancing, scheduler handling, cache updates between multiple servers, multi-servers for single tenant and more effective URL redirection.

Technical and functional changes included in the Empxtrack build 7.38 – 7.42 releases.

Date: 29 April 2019
Functional changes

Added a role based quick menu that allows easier navigation and quicker access to functionality.
Added features to allow anonymous submit on Suggestion box to capture suggestions from employees without storage of employee identifying information.
Added functionality to appraisal for adding rule engine based validations on different appraisal forms from the configuration screens.
Added functionality to mark a claim as paid when it is paid in payroll or outside payroll.
Added exit survey functionality to the Exit module. On capturing an exit, HR can send a survey to the exiting employee and capture their feedback for future analysis and reporting.
Added capability to add a document with manager note.
Significant improvements in Social Feed functionality and user interface to make the tool look like latest social feed tools.
Added functionality to allow HR to store images in the product that can be used in different parts of the product such as evaluations, landing pages, social feeds, offer letters, payslips etc. The functionality allows storage, deletion, update of images and also shares a URL that can be pasted in different areas of the application.
Added functionality to allow overrides to appraisal score calculations from the configuration section of the final score form using WF Extension functionality. This will allow easier updates and setup of the final score calculations.

Technical changes

Added file drag-and-drop widget for easier upload of files.
Fixes to some bugs in existing workflows for goalsheet workflows and messaging.
Added functionality at the WF Extension code to allow client specific filters to be added for extension to data filters.
Optimizations on generation of quick links and documents.
Added HTTP caching for display of images. This helps prevent multiple hits to the database.
Upgrade of all linked JAR files to latest versions including apache commons, CK Editor, gson, DWR, HTTP, quartz, struts.
Added functionality on all settings pages for correct redirection to parent page when a user clicks on Cancel
Conversion and upgrade of all schedulers to custom scheduler code for easier management and removal of tenant job xml file.
Admin level functionality to view custom scheduler status report for each live tenant.
Admin level functionality to clear all tomcat caches in one call. This will help admin update code centrally and re-initiate application servers centrally.
Partial migration of client custom code enabled to allow easier client patch fixes. Process incorporated for capturing client level changes and faster and more predictable updates without any downtime.
Improvements in look and feel of the Travel and Expense widgets for empxtrack
Added ImageHandler functionality in empxtrack that will store and retrieve all documents and images in a shared mapped drive instead of storage on database. Significant improvements in throughput of database performance, image loading and storage, backups and capabilities added for future CDN linkages and load balancing.
Added run time image resizing functionality to optimize image display for different sizes.
Corrections to DWR method calling across the product to enable correct parameter types. With updates of DWR jar file, fixed this security issue across the product.
Added data table functionality on payroll module for searching, sorting and better mobile enablement.
Payroll monthly sheet process synchronized with Full and Final monthly sheet process. The two processes were using a different code base leading to discrepancies.

Technical and functional changes included in the Empxtrack build 7.35 – 7.37 releases.

Date: 26 March 2019
Functional changes

Added scheduler functionality for a daily reminder email that will go out every morning to all employees. It contains the number of new feeds and pending tasks. This will allow employees to view any new social feeds.
Added report for displaying final calculated appraisal scores for employees even when the evaluations are not complete.
Added competency cross-tab report that will display employee fields and competency scores and ratings in one row. Competencies will be added to report headers.
Added self appraisal form as a cross-tab report.
Added features to allow CEO and senior leadership view succession pipelines and critical paths
Integration of IBM Assessment framework to Empxtrack Applicant Tracking functionality. Recruiters can view the available assessments and assign the same to candidates. Email integration and reverse callbacks when the candidate completes the assessment.
Added social feed feature in Project based CPM to increase interactions between project team members.
Added capabilities for employees and HR to store their electronic signatures for use in letters. !sign() calc-engine function allows the display of the signature. The functionality is available in My preferences section where each employee can store their signature.
Home page updates for HR Manager and Managers as an illustrative concept to allow significant configurability and increased usability for these roles. This will allow managers to quickly view evaluations and goals for their team and HR to quickly view the status of evaluations and 360 feedback.

Technical changes

Project based CPM: Added features to allow easier setup and uploading of multiple employees by a Project Manager + HR role.
Added horizontal scroller in reports to allow visibility of full report data.
Appraisal header information was displayed by default. Added property to optionally turn this off.
Fixes to appraisal widget on Measure page where the status pie-chart was not linked to the selected plan.
Fixed appraisal form issue where the form display breaks if there is a special character in the form title.
Added configuration capabilities to disable menu item. This helps in quick disabling of functionality if required.
Added checks on goal weight check where special characters in the goal weight were leading to goalsheet errors.
Optimizations in code during string concatenation. In many cases when we are building string lists, string based concat was inefficient and consumed large memory buffers. We have implemented !concat_sb which uses a string buffer for utilization of the same memory space. Updates to all calc engine functions and existing templates to support this functionality.

Technical and functional changes included in the Empxtrack build 7.32 – 7.34 releases.

Date: 18 Feb 2019
Functional changes

Employee profile now displays the reporting structure as an organization chart.
Added a new module in empxtrack: Project based Continuous Performance Management (CPM) for Professional Services organizations. This will allow annual evaluations to pull up data from project based evaluations that support dynamic teams, complete openness and transparency, project based goals, project specific skills+competencies and allows varying rules for creation, completion, interactions between team members.
CPM: Allowing project managers to set project goals, add / remove employees, manage time periods, initiate evaluations, manage skills and competencies, setup rules and interactions.
CPM: Allowing multiple appraisals to be created in one time period for an employee. Linking of an evaluation with project start date and end date.
CPM: Added a Project Manager + HR role. This role will allow evaluations (as Project Manager) and product configurations (as HR) without role switch.

Technical changes

Improvements in Message Handler to pass employee data and other related data more efficiently for the creation and display of messages.
User interface improvements in Job Description pop-up page from employee profile.
Capability to maintain employee-project mapping for historical reporting.
Improved efficiency of loading pages by implementing lazy load for widgets.

Technical and functional changes included in the Empxtrack build 7.31 releases.

Date: 10 Jan 2019
Functional changes

Changes and updates to the Claim process to add it as a part of the base product.
Addition of download 360 report with column wise ratings and comments by each participant (including employee). This is available to HR to download the data for further analysis.
Implementation of search functionality in calendar module.
Added features to view employee hierarchy and profile from the organization chart module.
Added feature for viewing availability of employees while setting meetings in add new event.

Technical changes

Improvements to the task scheduler email – both format and optimizations in identifying tasks.
Upgrades of entire product to bootstrap 4 and version upgrade for all plug-ins such as jQuery, CKEditor and datatables.
Enabled the state saving on all tables across the product. So if you apply a filter on a table and move to a different page and come back, the filter will continue to be applied on the table. This is especially helpful when the table was updated because of changed data.
Attendance API integration improvements
Display of custom reports (those saved by users) in a separate area in the report list.
Added Save and add more to the timesheet
Fixes to feedback form and improvements to its user interface.
Added options to run the Execute template code – at admin level for specific tenants. This will allow easier extraction or manipulation of client specific data by implementation teams.
Update of data server to a latest version on MySQL with higher responsiveness and backup capabilities.
Added a timestamp conversion function TO_DATE_FROM_TIMESTAMP_TZ that allows the conversion from timestamp to a date in any specific time zone. Also added TO_TIMESTAMP_FROM_DATE that converts any given date+time to a timestamp.
Fixes to some appraisal plan configuration issues. The rating for forms was currently being saved globally and not plan wise. This has been resolved.
Fixes to user interface of pop-up dialog boxes in relation to scrolling and button view.
Mail processor fixed to avoid sending emails to exited employees.
Addition of Project manager and project manager + hr role to handle the project based CPM product.
Improvements in workflow to allow the capture of P1 – P10 fields during create. This will allow custom field injection during workflow creation and avoid a redundant update to the database.
Optimized rendering of lots of static content when calc-engine was being used to render the page.

Technical and functional changes included in the Empxtrack build 7.27 releases.

Date: 20 Nov 2018
Functional changes

Added a concept of skill endorsements on employee profile. The employee skill sheet can be optionally displayed to all other employees using Social feeds or company directory and employees can endorse others on Skills and competencies. This is visible to managers and other people.
Improvements in the social feed layout and display.
Improvements in view of employee hierarchy by display of one higher level manager automatically.
URL type fields on HRIS will be displayed as links on the employee profile view. So if we have social ids like linkedIn id or facebook id, they will display as a link on the profile.
Added 2 links on the employee view – Setup meeting with and Assign a task. This will allow managers to easily setup meetings with other employees.
Allow users to suggest feeds with a workflow approval process. Allow feeds on self, a specific employee or a global feed. Also allow images and URLs in the feed.
Launch of alpha product for Candidate Relationship Management
Added range rating (low value, high value and corresponding score) for ratings that can be used for auto-calculating scores when achievements are captured in evaluations in goalsheet.

Technical changes

Enabling of Any employee role on configure HRIS fields.
Updates to the printable view of job description to allow proficiencies, coaching notes, training references to be displayed.
Added 3 distinct products for ADP users in the performance management section – linked to the launch of the new ADP site on marketplace. GST_Appraisal, GST_Appraisal_CPM, GST_Appraisal_CPM_Feedback
Updates to CKEditor configuration to display the correct widgets.
Storage of email content for marketing automation emails on the activity field for later reference.
Added an event scheduler that sends email based reminders 30 minutes before the event to all the participants. Further, display of the selected timezone on the email (rather than tenant time zone).
Conversion of CDMT widgets to properties to allow movement of widgets to any page desired.

Technical and functional changes included in the Empxtrack build 7.25 releases.

Date: 18 Oct 2018
Functional changes

Enabled comments (common notes) feature for appraisal and goalsheet. By enabling this option, employees and managers can write notes in an appraisal or goalsheet throughout the year. This feature can also be enabled for the Any employee role.
Integrated Talent framework Proficiences, Coaching notes, learning references, interview questions, development statements to empxtrack job descriptions and integrated the two such that data moves from the talent framework to empxtrack job descriptions including copy of competencies and skills. Also added options for edit of these features in empxtrack once they have been moved over from the talent framework to the empxtrack job descriptions.
Added a URL type in HRIS fields that will be clickable when being displayed in employee profile or career profile.
Added a Task plan concept where a sequence of (linked) tasks can be created and assigned to employees with a variety of rules for completion dates, reminders, completion rules etc.. When the task plan is initiated, all the relevant employees will get tasks in their calendars. Examples could include Task plans for on-boarding and exit.
Enabling of endorsement functionality. Any employee role can endorse another employee (who is a connection) for skills and competencies. The endorsements show up on the employee career profile.

Technical changes

Added a create link option in the rich text editor to allow URLs to be saved in events and tasks.
Timesheet has been converted to mobile mode.
Added option to allow any page to be setup as the home page for a specific tenant.
Added changes to ConvertData and AbstractObject to convert any javascript, json object to an abstract object. This will allow us to move any kind of data record from JS to empxtrack and save, process the same.
Fixes to Job Description gap analysis. Competencies and skills were not reflected correctly and were not consistent across employee and manager views.

Technical and functional changes included in the Empxtrack build 7.16-7.24 releases.

Date: 27 Sep 2018
Functional changes

Added filters in compensation management to allow easier management of the compensation pages. Also enabled compensation dashboards for easy analysis of comp increment trends during the cycle.
Enabled report for managers to view achievements capture in a given date range.
Visibility of rewards, 360 pulse comments for employees to display on their profile.
Import for talent framework enabled
Added dashboards for exit analysis that include tenure analysis, rating analysis, department wise trends and exit reason analysis.
Added options to download horizontal TDS advice as a CSV report. This will allow HR Managers to analyze TDS advice for employees in an excel format.
Added configurable reports for training, rewards and discipline
Added options to view career plan notes by employees and managers.
Added option to generate letters on compensation page for finalized compensation. Further added options to add more employees, remove employees,
Enabled HR to add selected employees to a compensation plan directly from the manage appraisal page. This will allow employees to be included in the compensation increment plan as soon as the performance appraisal is finalized/accepted.
Added options for a manager to add a team goal
Actionable science chat-bot embedded and enabled in product.
Added report on manager journal entries.
Added Continuous Performance Management process, plans and workflows to the base product.
Added options for employee menu at the top of the appraisal. This will allow managers to write notes, view employee profile, setup trainings, meetings etc from within the appraisal without going to another page.
Added all configuration options in goalsheet form of appraisal that are available in the goalsheet module.
Added a time period option for the skill sheet and also published a skill sheet report. This will allow the identification of new skills added for employees in a given time period.
Added a report that displays all the notes received by employees. Available to managers and hr manager.
Regular appraisal will contain all the details for the CPM checkpoints by the use of ReadOnlyAppraisalForm. There is complete integration enabled between CPM and annual appraisals.
Added a new employee role – Any employee. This will typically be used in the Social feeds and cases where no relationships exists between two employees. The Any employee role will allow visibility to specific sections of employee data such as employment history, reporting relationships, rewards etc.
Added all sections of the career profile and employee profile on visibility permission setup. Sections that are dependent on workflows (such as appraisal, goalsheet) will not have edit rights in the HRIS access permissions.

Technical changes

Option added to all reports to include exited employee data too.
Improvements in User Interface for My Profile, Employee data view and Career Profile
When an employee logs in, their default span will be in the following order based on their having the specific role: HR Manager, Manager, Employee
To avoid multiple secondary links on a page, we have enabled a More option that will be enabled if there are more than 2 links. 3rd link onward will be displayed in the More menu.
Implementation of scheduler for event reminders
Multiple security fixes related to visibility of data (360 reports, HRIS fields) based on ADP security audit
Added security checks for all settings links to prevent changes to properties by non authorized users.
Optimizations to quartz scheduler for handling high frequency jobs (such as event schedulers).
Workflow movement will display at the top in a scrollable view appraisal (all forms display on a single page)
Added options to change workflow state for CPM processes.
Added a new form ReadOnlyAppraisalForm in the appraisal module. This form can invoke code from WorkflowExtensions and can contain any custom queries or data capture or display.

Technical and functional changes included in the Empxtrack build 7.16-7.18 releases.

Date: 18 July 2018
Functional changes

Measure page now displays options for managers to select employees for evaluation. Earlier they had to go to the appraisal plan page for the same.
Added an option to display the workflow submit time for each workflow.
Implementation of dashboard in training for both employees and managers.
Display of salary increments in compensation planning has been enabled as a graph.
Added monthly in-time attendance statistics for an employee that will display the start time for employees as a dashboard with drill-down features.
Improvements in user interface for training program capture.

Technical changes

Implementation of scrolling in various functionalities related to payroll, leave to allow fixed column and row headers
Addition of realtime API calls for attendance capture. https://[client].empxtrack.com/empxtrack/api/1.1/captureAttendanceData
Added options for setup of header info in reverse callback API calls for data extraction from customer sites.
Fixes to skill sheet visibility issues on employee end.
Improvements in functionality related to events and tasks and many improvements in Calendar functionality.
Addition of scheduler to import ADP data automatically.
Added options to sendMail calc engine function to optionally use the default email template.
Added options to download TDS Advice in PDF format
Corrected the error message and functionality when a manager submits his own name while applying for a self-services process (such as leave) for one of their subordinate.
Major improvements in visibility of HRIS fields when we had role based access enabled for the fields.

Technical and functional changes included in the Empxtrack build 7.11-7.15 releases.

Date: 08 June 2018
Functional changes

Added an option in goal sheet form of performance appraisal module to pre-define goals during the plan creation mode. This will allow a set of goals to be setup in the plan itself and employees will get these goals during the initiation of the appraisal. This will be helpful in confirmation appraisal process.
Added a concept of grouped competency in the competency form of performance appraisal. An example of this could be Communication competency as a parent that contains sub-competencies: Written communication and Spoken communication. Appropriate user interface changes made to support this in appraisal and printable reports. The parent score calculation supports various scoring options which could be based on average of child scores, individual override score or no score.
Added capabilities to setup tasks for all stakeholders while initiation of appraisal or goal sheet. As an example, HR can setup tasks for managers to periodically discuss goal progress with their team members on specific dates throughout the year. These will automatically show up on the calendar view of all selected employees, their managers etc.
Added option in 360 Feedback to allow different ratings for different attributes.
Added a skill sheet form in performance appraisal that will display an employees skill sheet, their current ratings, gaps with the job description and a capability to add new skills or competencies to the sheet by a manager. This will allow managers to identify skill requirements for each employee during the performance appraisal and allow HR to view gaps and plan training interventions.
Added a report in Performance appraisal module that displays all the reviews that are pending on a given date. This assumes an anniversary based appraisal.
Added capability to auto-generate appraisal plan tags while setting up the appraisal plan. Multiple options available to the users. This will allow cleaner generation of tags
Improvements in user interface for compensation planning module. Formatting and alignment of salaries and addition of dashboards of career growth added.
In compensation planning module, HR can create a compensation plan (setup the different guidelines) and then Managers can add subordinates to the plan and setup their increments and take through an approval process.
Addition of My ticket to employee section in the version 7 application.
PIP visibility added for HR Manager role also. Further, PIP reports can be printed out for full or partial PIPs.
Significant improvements in the appraisal printable view design.
Added capabilities to display the anniversary and birthday section to all roles (employee, manager, hr). It was not visible in employee roles earlier.
If the time period and financial year are synchronized, changing one in the filter (at user level) will automatically update the other one too leading to a smoother user experience.
Added a horizontal TDS advise report for India specific tenants. HR can have a tabular view of TDS advise for multiple employees in one report.
Merged Form 16A and B reports for India payroll.

Technical changes

Added a property to enable or disable the change of an exiting employees email id when the employee is marked exited.
Display of reports based on the currently selected user role instead of the reports being displayed based on all roles available to the logged in user.
Support for UTF-8 (at database level) for custom HRIS fields. We can store arabic/multi-language character set in HRIS custom fields.
Added an option to send a notification to employees when a new letter is available on their employee records
Improvements in Task and measures interface in editable goal section of performance appraisal.
Visibility of Job Description gaps for different roles was throwing an error is specific cases. Fixed.
FTP connection class improvements to allow usernames, passwords and URLs to support special characters.
Authentication setting UI has been added under account setting widget which helps user to configure sso parameters for logging.
Goalsheet achievements will display as a label when the achievement capture is from a drop-down. Earlier, the corresponding value was being displayed.
Fixes to wrong storage of travel dates in the Travel and expenses module.
Added icons on icon bar for viewing event calendar and adding a new event.
The default view of calendar on the Message Center page has been changed to Daily view. Fixes some issues related to validations on calendar. Added optimizations for loading of calendar. Added code to allow color constancy when viewing subordinate calendar. Earlier, colors used to get changed each time when we reloaded the calendar.
Security improvements in encryption and decryption logic. Keys for security removed from the code and will be managed by deployment team. Associated improvements in Masquerade, Support desk and SSO based logins functionality. All database related encryption updated to handle the change.
Fixes in different dashboards regarding display of averages. Currently the averages were displayed assuming 12 month period. Now we will use the no of months elapsed since the beginning of the year to identify the correct average.
Closed tasks will be marked in a different color than open tasks.
Improvements in calendar events (hiding messages when event is accepted or rejected), update events when changes are done, repeat events added.
Update to latest version of Font awesome.
Added freezing of first column and row for leave and payroll reports. This will allow for easier viewing of reports.

Technical and functional changes included in the Empxtrack build 7.07-7.10.3 releases.

Date: 10 Apr 2018
Functional changes

Added capability to display a label in performance appraisal final score page instead of the calculated score. Configurations added to the final score page to allow this to happen.
Added team view chart for HR Manager. It was disabled in the new version earlier.
Added a drill down attendance analytics graph where a manager can drill down and view attendance on a day in the Process page itself.
Added capabilities to store comments and ratings for relation 3, relation 4, relation 5 in performance appraisal. Added mechanism to map the relations to roles in the setup of the appraisal plan.
Improvements in setup of visibility rules for appraisal plans. Much simpler and intuitive interface for view, edit rights for each role.
Availability of comment helper in performance appraisal while simultaneously rating multiple employees on a single attribute in manager mode.
Added capabilities to link training courses to skills and competencies in the manager mode and direct nomination of employees while viewing a course linked to the skill or competency.
Added Career planning functionality at employee level. Employees can setup career goals by picking up the following options: Training, transfer, new qualification, promotion to a new title, role change. Also added capabilities to view progressions from the current job description to linked job descriptions.
In performance appraisal setup, added a capability to copy form level permissions from one form to the next while adding a new form. This will allow an easier setup in copying visibility permissions across different roles.
Removal of interview and test notification when a hiring manager has submitted a candidates interview feedback form.
Added an option to allow HR Manager to update exit details. This was required because in many cases the last date of working was updated post the submission of separation request and led to back end database updates. HR Manager (responsible for exit) can update this any time.
Update of user interface in Leave application to allow leave balance and pending leave details to display.
Capability added to clear attendance status values such as holiday, shift, weekend off. This was required because in many cases the attendance records were generated even when holiday calendar or weekend roster were not generated or shift allocation was not done. Now HR can pick employees from Manage attendance page and clear data for selected employees. This allows self service at the HR Manager end and on clearing, all of this data will be regenerated automatically.
Added a java utility to execute a file based calc engine template. Allow easier setup of attendance reading mechanisms from local databases and transfer of files to empxtrack ftp servers. The utility will support integration with local databases through JDBC, JDBC-ODBC connections, FTP to remote servers, file read-write capabilities, execution of database templates in case the template is to be run on empxtrack servers and all non-web server based activities.

Technical changes

Improvements to layout of different widgets and icons in mobile mode.
Added a workflow capability to associate a template file with a workflow. This will allow the creation of new object types on the fly using AbstractObject key-value pair, use the template for input of data, allow an approval process on the object and then associated persistence to any database table once the approval is given for storage. Empxtrack can link to any approval process now.
Fixes to mail processor to allow outlook integration for events. Improvements in invite to allow HTML to go into the ICS file (with appropriate changes)
UI improvements in the manpower planning module.
Travel, Training, Leave, Interview & test events are now added to event calendar for an employee.
Issue resolved related to flicker of tooltip when a mouse hovers on a tooltip.
Chart freezing issue resolved when we click on an element the second time.
Support added in salary transaction table, payroll master table to handle 3 decimal places to assist in payroll processing for Middle East regions.
Fixed payroll issue where employees could view their pay-slip even when a stop-payment was done for them.
Immediate update of message count on message icon when a message gets hidden or added.
Added support for google app integration and SSO with empxtrack. SAML integration is enabled in empxtrack as an additional SSO option. We are now integrated with OAuth2, SAML, ADFS, LDAP, Okta, LinkedIn
Upload employee data widget has been removed from the Process menu and is available in settings only.
Fixes to appraisal notification reminder functionality based on the workflow selection.
Fixes on identifying the total claim amount and its integration with payroll.
Fixes to setup of salary structure when new heads are added or moved up/down. Recalculate did not work correctly after 1 such movement.
Change of navigation architecture. We no longer open pages in pop-up mode and instead open it inline or on the same page. This is for an improved user experience.
Added option to allow user to define their own landing page.
Fields hidden from specific roles during HRIS field setup were visible in reports. This has been fixed.
Added pagination on help desk, promotion and career widgets implemented.
Added collapse capabilities for report menu structure.

Technical and functional changes included in the Empxtrack build 7.04-7.06 releases.

Date: 15 Feb 2018
Functional changes

Functionality added to handle training nomination requests at manager and employee end with options for workflow setup with each training course.
Training nomination now allows a search of appropriate training program on multiple criteria.
Release of calendar functionality.
Improvements in user interface for Task and event section for calendar. Capability added to view another persons calendar and conversion of user time zone to GMT for global ICS file compatibility. Event and Task acceptance messaging linked in the application.
Added capabilities to view gap between job description and current skills at employee and manager section. This will help employees setup their development plan in relation to their career goals.

Technical changes

Improvements in ADP data import. Issues resolved related to, removal of underscore from URLs, identifying correct email, manager name and employment status id from the parsed record, scrolling across results where multiple result sets may be returned by ADP during a data import.
Improvement of widget rendering process.
Issue fixed related to view of wrong employee profile from Login section.
Added capability to BCC each system email to a specific address
Fixed errors related to copy of appraisal, onboarding and feedback plans.
Optimization in setup of filters for the different pages.

Technical and functional changes included in the Empxtrack build 7.00-7.03 releases.

Date: 11 Jan 2018
Functional changes

Launch of empxtrack 7 to improve user experience https://empxtrack.com/global-hr-software/
Completely new portal with an engaging and user-friendly design and one-click access to functionality.
Widgets for each module with easy to view dashboards and links for accessing deeper functionality.
Easy access to commonly used widgets such as Chat, Time cards, Messages & Notifications, Polls, 360 Pulse
On page filters and role changes for easy scrolling to prior time periods and viewing details for a specific group of employees.
Cascading goals and real time visibility on check-ins for employees, managers, management and HR.
Managers can add team goals for their direct and dotted line and view the achievements. Auto linkage of parent goal to child goal.
Added capability to setup targets and associated labels for goals. As an example, a target of 100 New Customers can be setup for a goal where the goal is Increase in customers and target is 100 and label is New Customers.
Ready to use informative dashboards in all modules. We have dashboards for goal achievements, appraisal status, leave history, attendance, timesheet, travel, expense, exits, salary and increments, spend – both at an employee level (where applicable) and manager / hr level.
Significant improvements in reports. All reports are displayed in the correct category and easy to view the other reports.
Calendar capabilities for setting appointments with employees and non-employees. Full integration with external calendar applications.
Social feeds for higher employee engagement.
View of skill inventory and allocation of training programs on gaps
Integrated goal management with a much easier mechanism for managers where they can view their own goals and employee goals on 1 page.
Added options to goalsheet to allow a non-workflow based goal setting mechanism. This will allow companies to setup a more flexible goal setting and achievement tracking process.
Capability added to design the home page.
Text configuration capabilities added for 360 report. Each section of the report can be enabled/disabled on an as required basis
Linkage of goal sheet, appraisal, 360 feedback, compensation, variable pay, training, rewards, performance improvement plan, promotion, increments to application time periods
Linkage of travel, expense, timesheet, attendance, leave, help desk, payroll, exit, loan, benefits to financial periods.
Capability to create or view multiple goal sheets.

Technical changes

Options added to goal configuration to allow control of the view of different dashboards.
Fixed issues related to view of reward comments
Fixed issue related to download goal-sheet.
Breadcrumbs of all pages are corrected
Manage goal sheet status link will be only visible when workflow based goal setting process is used
Implemented capabilities to enable or disable widgets in the new design based on Roles, Groups and specific employees.
Fixed issues related to capture of geo-location in attendance.
Query optimizations on rewards module.

View Previous Release Notes here.